The sport has a certain reputation, in part because of the tendency of male contestants to wear sparkly, Liberace-style costumes, Scheving said. But "in my mind, it is one of the most difficult sports in the world," he said, listing several reasons on the board.
He dropped to the floor. "I go to the football guys, 'If it's sissy, let's go down and do a one-armed push-up and then go from side to side and up,"' he said, before performing a maneuver that resembled a push-up the way a double back flip resembles jumping lightly in the air. "They never can."
He won a silver medal at the World Aerobics Championship in Japan. He won the European championship, twice. Other awards followed. ("Maria!" he yelled, summoning his personal assistant. "When was I sportsman of the year, 1994 or 1996?").
The first LazyTown product was a book, Go, Go, LazyTown! Then came a stage musical, written by Scheving. He starred as Sports Elf, a Sportacus precursor in a woodsy mustard-yellow outfit.
"In Iceland there's a whole tradition of elves," he said. He himself does not necessarily believe in them, and was irritated when a German interviewer repeatedly demanded, in apparent seriousness: "Are you sure you're not really an elf?"
When he is filming, Scheving said he works "17.7 hours a day." But he has other interests. He and his girlfriend, whom he met at the gym 18 years ago and is LazyTown's chief financial officer, have three children.
While he sits in the makeup chair eating his porridge on filming days, employees line up for an audience like airplanes stacked up on the runway. "Maria says, 'OK, you have five minutes each,"' he said.
He also holds meetings while in the shower (though he closes the curtain) and strews dumbbells strategically around the building. "Sometimes when I'm talking to people in post-production, I'm lifting weights," he said.
A believer in fitting exercise into daily life, Scheving jumps up and down 20 times when he boards a plane; performs 100 push-ups before bed; and does an indefinite number of squats before getting in the shower, even at the public swimming pool. "My son thinks I'm a nutcase," he said.
As he was winding down, Scheving showed a promotional video that included shots of his silver-medal aerobics routine. Then he put on his jacket and prepared to disappear into the late-afternoon Icelandic gloom. "I'm going to a bank to sign a deal for US$10 million," he said.
But he had a few final thoughts. "My philosophy is 'learn while you live,"' he said. "LazyTown is about balance. I'm not there yet.
"There's a lot of things I want to do," he declared. "I want to learn Italian. I want to learn to play tennis better. I want to motivate the world, basically."
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